The Warning Signs Were Already There:
University Governance, Systemic Non-Compliance and Regulatory Failure
The Fair Work Ombudsman’s current Compliance and Enforcement Policy, published in 2025, provides useful context when looking back at this experience. I referenced the current policy in my previous post as a further reading resource, rather than suggesting that this particular version was the policy operating in July 2022.
The policy describes a regulatory role that extends beyond providing information and referring people elsewhere. The FWO’s statutory functions include monitoring compliance with the Fair Work Act 2009, inquiring into and investigating conduct or practices that may contravene workplace laws, commencing enforcement proceedings, referring matters to other authorities where appropriate and, in certain circumstances, representing employees.
Its regulatory model progresses from encouraging voluntary compliance, to guiding compliance where necessary, to “enforcing the law when it is in the public interest.”
What’s particularly striking to me now are the factors the FWO says it considers when assessing information and deciding whether regulatory intervention is warranted.
The policy asks whether alleged non-compliance:
- is isolated or “part of a pattern of behaviour”;
- is serious or significant;
- remains ongoing;
- affects other workers, workplaces or an industry sector;
- indicates “system-wide non-compliance”; and
- occurs in circumstances involving “a significant power imbalance between the duty holder and workers.”
It also considers the direct and indirect impact upon affected people, whether they have the ability and resources to commence their own proceedings, whether deterrence is required, and whether the matter falls within a regulatory priority.
And then there’s this question:
“What would be the impact if the FWO did not act in response to the concern?”
That question takes on even greater significance when considered alongside what has emerged about the Australian university sector.
——
The university sector was already on the regulatory radar
This isn’t entirely a matter of hindsight.
In June 2022, shortly before I approached the Fair Work Ombudsman, the FWO identified the university sector as a compliance and enforcement priority for 2022–23.
The immediate regulatory focus was the extraordinary scale of employee underpayments occurring across Australian universities. But even then, the problem wasn’t being described merely as a collection of accidental payroll mistakes. The FWO was identifying concerns about governance and management oversight associated with significant underpayments.
What’s happened since has only widened that picture.
The FWO’s subsequent regulatory work has described the university sector as systemically non-compliant, with universities facing investigations, litigation, enormous remediation programs and enforceable undertakings over employee underpayments.
But wage theft and underpayment are only one part of the much larger conversation now occurring about Australian universities.
See also:
——
What we know now
Since 2022, scrutiny of Australian higher education governance and workplace culture has intensified considerably.
The Senate inquiry into the quality of governance at Australian higher education providers has examined governance structures, accountability, university leadership, expenditure, risk management, conflicts of interest, financial reporting and the effectiveness of regulatory oversight.
Alongside federal scrutiny have been other inquiries, investigations and public revelations concerning governance and organisational culture within parts of the university sector.
The picture that’s emerged raises questions far beyond payroll. (Although wage theft is extremely serious on its own. See my own documented experience that was ignored by regulators for years: http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/09/theft-of-two-decades-of-accrued-leave.html and then this doozy to add insult to injury - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/09/greater-wage-theft-and-fraud-from-pcbu.html).
It raises questions about:
- institutional power
- accountability
- governance culture
- workplace culture
- fear of speaking up
- treatment of staff
- conflicts of interest and
- whether existing regulatory structures are capable of protecting individuals confronting enormously powerful institutions.
My blog posts tell my own story of what happened when I requested a safe work environment - to avoid the risk of a work-related hypertension diagnosis becoming a heart attack, stroke or having a nervous breakdown - burnout had already happened.
And I’m nowhere near finished. I’m only up to July 2022. My story is likely only one of many.
I had no choice but to fight back these “enormously powerful institutions”. I asked for a safe work environment and I found myself fighting to save my life on a surreal systemic level.
So the answer to the last point about whether existing regulatory structures are capable of protecting individuals confronting enormously powerful institutions, is a big resounding NO.
See:
That broader context matters.
It doesn’t mean that every allegation against every university is established, nor that every institution or executive behaves in the same way.
But it does mean that serious complaints emerging from universities cannot simply be assumed to be isolated interpersonal disputes.
When similar concerns continue emerging across institutions, inquiries and regulatory processes, the question contained in the FWO’s own current policy becomes increasingly important:
“Do the allegations indicate a system-wide non-compliance?”
And alongside it:
“Are there indications of a significant power imbalance between the duty holder and workers?”
Universities are large, sophisticated institutions. They possess substantial financial resources and specialist expertise across executive management, governance, human resources, employment relations, workplace safety, risk, insurance and law.
The individual worker confronting that “machinery” possesses nothing remotely comparable.
That imbalance becomes even more profound when the worker is already injured, distressed, financially compromised or without effective representation.
——
Wage theft was a warning, not necessarily the boundary of the problem
The enormous university underpayment scandals matter because they demonstrate what can happen when governance and compliance failures become embedded within powerful institutions.
But perhaps the lesson shouldn’t be limited to wages.
If governance weaknesses can allow widespread non-compliance concerning something as measurable as an employee’s pay, it’s reasonable to ask what happens in areas that are much harder to see and quantify:
- psychosocial safety
- bullying
- adverse action
- institutional retaliation
- complaint handling
- conflicts of interest
- employee voice and
- the exercise of power over workers who challenge an organisation.
Those issues don’t necessarily produce a payroll discrepancy that can later be calculated in a remediation program.
Their consequences can nevertheless be devastating and they can extend beyond the employee.
Workplace harm follows people home.
Families live with it.
Financial security can be destroyed by it.
Careers can disappear into it.
People can become frightened to speak because they have watched what happens to somebody else who did.
That’s why governance and organisational culture matter.
——
What happens when nobody looks at the whole?
The current FWO policy speaks about prioritisation, deterrence, sustainability and system-wide effect.
It describes enforcement not merely as remedying an individual contravention, but as a means of changing unlawful behaviour, deterring repetition and addressing drivers of non-compliance across workplaces and industries.
That’s the regulatory principle that resonates most strongly with me now.
Fragmented regulation can examine individual pieces of a problem without anybody ever examining the pattern created when those pieces are put together.
And that returns me to perhaps the most important question contained in the policy:
“What would be the impact if the FWO did not act in response to the concern?”
That should never be an abstract administrative question.
The impact ultimately lands somewhere.
It lands on workers.
It lands on their livelihoods.
It lands on their families.
And when serious concerns are repeatedly treated as isolated individual disputes rather than potential indicators of something larger, the system also risks losing the very information that might have revealed a pattern much earlier.
What has emerged across the university sector since 2022 makes that question worth asking.
Not simply:
What happened to individual workers?
But:
What were those individual workers trying to tell us about the institutions themselves?
This post follows on from the previous instalment of my own story, after having attempted the FWO (and there’s more to come in future posts of my perseverance down this regulatory path too):
http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/08/fair-work-ombudsman-another-door.html.
See also:
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/compliance-and-enforcement
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